The Wedding Plan.
Her fiancé dumps her, but, in for a penny, in for a shekel, 32-year-old Michal decides to go ahead with her big fat Jewish wedding anyhow. "It's a small task for God to find me a groom by the end of Hanukkah," she says.
Love may or may not be blind, but faith definitely is. The Wedding Plan is an offbeat-but-poignant Israeli rom-com from Rama Burshtein, the writer-director responsible for the 2012 melodrama Fill the Void. Delicate, lonely and dating in a hurry, Michal (Noa Kooler) has a "nutty energy." The God-fearing suitors she is presented with are a curious collection, but Burshtein never plays for easy laughs.
A deaf man who brings along a sign-language interpreter asks Michal why she agreed to meet him after previously turning him down. "Despair" is her reason for reconsidering; the honesty is crushing for all concerned. The Wedding Plan should not be confused with the 2001 Hollywood thing The Wedding Planner. While the latter shoved a hopeless plot down our throats, the former takes an improbable premise and makes it believable.
Brad Wheeler